Standard ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description - Second Edition (1999 - )

From
1999
Website
https://www.ica.org/en/isadg-general-international-standard-archival-description-second-edition

Summary

The ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description was first released by the ICA AdHoc Commission on Descriptive Standards during 1994-1995. The second edition of the standard was adopted by the ICA Committee on Descriptive Standards in Stockholm, Sweden on 19-22 September 1999. The purpose of the standard was to define a standardised list of elements and rules for the description of archives and to describe the kinds of information that should or must be included in such descriptions (ICA, 1999).

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Details

The Records in Context - Conceptual Model (RiC-CM) aims to supercede the ISAD(G) standard, along with the other three core standards ISAAR (CPF), ISDF and ISDIAH in order to create a unified and more readily useable and explicit standard for archival description:

"ICA standards have been successful in promoting international consistency in descriptive practices. They have facilitated system developments, data sharing, and cooperative integrated access. However, because the four standards were created serially rather than together, the intended complementary interrelation of each with the others is implicit rather than explicit. Many archivists have had difficulty understanding how to use the four standards together to form complete archival description. Further, the emergence of semantic web technologies, in particular conceptual models (or ontologies) and Linked Open Data (LOD), offer many benefits to the archival community to improve archival descriptive practice and to make it more effective to better serve and expand the user community: methods for clarifying and making explicit the concepts and assumptions underlying archival descriptive practice; methods for formally representing archival descriptive data that enables computational use and reuse of the data to provide access to and understanding of archival resources; and methods for sharing archival descriptive data in integrated cultural heritage access systems. The challenges presented by the existing standards and the demonstrated promise of the new technologies led ICA to review its strategies related to the current descriptive standards. Various local and national efforts have seized the initiative in the development of archival conceptual models, and while these initiatives clearly demonstrate a growing awareness of and interest in the benefits offered by the new technologies, to ensure that the next generation of archival descriptive standards reflects international consensus and furthers the consensus building, collaboration, sharing of knowledge and technologies, it is time to learn from and bring these initiatives together" (ICA, 2016, para. 1).

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Online Resources

Winsome Adam

Created: 31 July 2018, Last modified: 1 August 2018